


Speaking in Volumes

by RecessiveJean



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1920s, F/F, Getting Together, Librarians, Loquacious love interest, Superheroes, Taciturn heroine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:46:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26864608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: Beth took the job at the library because her father thought she lacked purpose.The girl who asks all the odd questions might just be in a position to provide it.
Relationships: Superheroine/Librarian Who Keeps Answering Her Increasingly Obvious Reference Questions
Comments: 9
Kudos: 33
Collections: Canon Ball 2020





	Speaking in Volumes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KannaOphelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KannaOphelia/gifts).



The town was strongly in support of expanding the rail line, no matter what Cal Murphy said. Of course, being Cal Murphy he naturally said quite a lot, not much of it fit to print in any paper, and certainly not in the local ones, which considered themselves a cut above the coarser ways of the big city news publications.

The parts of his objection that were suitable for consumption were already perfectly understood at the local level without having to be printed. Cal was opposed to the notion of an interurban rail connecting their town with Twin Rivers and Centerville because his taxi service did good business in commuter traffic, particularly with the college having a campus in each town, and he knew that opening streetcar travel would eat into that. The town’s disinterest in his opposition was equally well understood: Cal had also not expanded his service beyond three elderly Model T Fords and a gleaming new Model A that he guarded so jealously he would not even send it out for anybody but the highest caliber of clientele, and so his vote would not hold any sway with the local Chamber of Commerce.

An interurban streetcar line held all the egalitarian appeal of a new and modern age, and the town was for it. Entertaining, even performatively, the opposition of one local businessman who was too vocally irate about the threat to his profits to couch his objection in more tactful terms made little political sense in the face of such overwhelming public approbation. The line was duly approved, construction on the expansion began, and nobody had time to hear Cal Murphy’s opinion about it.

This would likely have been the case even in the ordinary way of things, but it became especially true when the Blue Flame made her first appearance.

Work on the line was advancing nicely, and some optimistic projections even suggested that it might be finished before first snowfall, which delighted the town. A small press tour had been arranged to document and report on progress to date, and was well underway when a key piece of machinery failed, somewhat catastrophically, and the worker operating it became entangled around his midsection. The machine began to roll away, dragging him along behind, when a golden flash of grim purpose descended upon it and in a twinkling, the worker was freed.

The machine tipped into the river, a smoking, belching ruin, leaving the worker standing on the riverbank in a daze.

Of his rescuer, there was no sign.

She would reappear again, and indeed would become quite a fixture in the coming weeks, but at the time that was the first anybody had seen of her. Not that they could see much, at first: she was ever so fast. At first there was some doubt as to whether she was even a woman, but the worker was fairly positive on that point, and several of the younger reporters, with better eyes, had also been sure as well. So the word was out, and did not take long to spread all over.

Beth had not been on hand to witness the actual rescue; she had been working. But people came into the library almost immediately after, so she was caught up to speed in almost no time at all. Blue and gold, they all agreed. Her outfit was some combination of the two, and it all had seemed to whip and blur together as she moved. Everybody said you could hardly make out any details at all as she blazed along the ground to reach the worker, and worked him free before he could even finish his second cry for help. Then she was gone, and the town erupted in her wake.

Reporters on hand to witness the event had fallen all over each other in the rush to get back to their respective press rooms. The _Post_ broke the story first but it was the _Clarion_ that came up with her name, and boosted their readership by fourteen percent in consequence. By lunch time the following day, the Blue Flame was all anybody could talk about. Admittedly they talked less about her around Beth, given the customary library protocol, but she still picked up things here and there.

The furor of speculation, rumor and general mayhem was cacophonic, and Cal Murphy hadn’t a hope of making himself heard over that. It didn’t stop him pursuing his private grievances in his own way, though. He went to the library and demanded all their books on law.

“What could he want with a law book?” Myrtle demanded when she found Beth laboring in the guts of the card catalog, struggling to find a relevant text.

“I suppose he imagines he can take the rail line to court,” said Beth.

Myrtle’s ensuing sigh was so gusty it was a wonder it didn’t ruffle the cards. After showing Beth where they were to be found, she made it clear it would be Beth’s job, and not Myrtle’s, to help Cal Murphy find law books whenever he asked for them, but she forbade her to provide further assistance on that point.

“He may learn in his own time that you can’t fight city hall,” Myrtle said, “if he is the sort of person who can learn things.” And she cast a dubious glance to where Cal lurked around the corner of the card catalog, fuming beneath his peaked cap.

Beth, who had not been any too eager to help Cal Murphy sort out his law books regardless—Cal had a volatile temper and an uncomfortable way of looking at anything in a skirt—was grateful for freedom from that expectation.

Over the course of the ensuing days, as the Blue Flame turned up more regularly around the town and came to be known as _their_ Blue Flame, since she seemed inclined to stay, Beth became accustomed to Cal’s schedule. She strove to have a book or two set aside for his use before he even came through the door. That saved her having to lead him back into the stacks, where, to be fair, he had not _actually_ taken liberties with the enforced proximity of their persons between the shelves, but she nevertheless always had an uneasy suspicion that he was thinking he might _like_ to.

It was Tuesday, midday, when the usual gust of fresh air that heralded the opening of the front doors wafted down the center aisle. Beth, anticipating Cal, immediately turned from the last of the books she was settling on the restocking cart and headed around the corner, prepared to retrieve the newest research material for his ongoing legal battle—that it was primarily theoretical still at this stage did not seem to make it any less of a battle for Cal—and return to her work.

But Cal wasn’t there.

It was a girl, instead, who approached the reference desk at a rapid pace. She moved with an air of impatience on the nicest legs Beth had ever seen.

Beth couldn’t decide which to focus on first.

The air of impatience, certainly, would usually demand immediate attention. Beth knew where her duty lay: Myrtle had made her expectations on that and all other points abundantly clear since Beth’s first day of work.

“It is true that a library is not the kind of establishment in which one might expect to find the attentive raptures of a _saleswoman_ , but we do serve a public good all the same. I do not permit that any servant of the public good should be slack in her service.”

And Beth was not. So surely the air of impatience must demand her focus.

But the legs . . . Beth could not help staring. They were clad in sheerest silk stockings, balanced on trim green pumps with just the right height of heel to show off the curve of the patron’s calves to perfection.

Impatience warranted notice, without question. But those legs . . .

The problem was taken neatly off Beth’s hands by Myrtle herself, who sailed up to her post with the air of homecoming magnificence innate to all battleships returning to berth from parts unknown, and asked the patron how _she_ might be of assistance. Beth turned away rather than hear the reply, and started back toward the farthest stacks with her cart of books. There was no choice, after all, to be made. Myrtle would see to the young lady instead.

She was conscious of disappointment, which made no sense. There had been no likelihood of her assisting the girl when Myrtle was available to do so: Beth was not the reference librarian, as Myrtle always took pains to remind Beth at regular intervals. Beth worked at the library because her father was friends with a gentleman who had made a generous endowment to the library fund, and after being assured that a place could be found for Beth, had told her that now she was finished high school she might as well get out of the house and find something useful to do.

“Useful” in this case meant whatever tasks Myrtle delegated to her bargain-rate underling, from locking up at night to helping an underachieving local entrepreneur seek legal advice to reshelving books, which was what she was doing when the young woman with the nicest legs Beth had ever seen rounded the corner and started down the aisle.

Beth stared.

In addition to the nicest legs Beth had ever seen, the girl had a wing of hair the color of sunsets swept back from her forehead. A profusion of finger waves framed full, soft cheeks, which style was made all the more noticeable by the fact that she wore no hat. Her air of impatience had evolved into a rush of purpose, and Beth, long accustomed to removing herself from the targeted path of all persons evincing those hallmarks, stood back against the shelf and waited for the girl to pass.

But the girl did not pass. Instead she stopped, and looked at Beth.

Beth raised her gaze from the nice legs and stared into a face whose expression she had imagined would be sharp and searching, but instead shocked her with its warm, open curiosity.

“Hello there,” said the girl with the legs. “Gosh but this place is a labyrinth, and I’ve no mind to meet a Minotaur. Do you think you could point me toward the part where you keep the poisons?”

Beth opened her mouth, then closed it.

“Books,” the clarification followed quickly. “About poisons. Know absolutely nothing about any of it, I’m afraid, and I’ve got to learn everything I can on damnably short notice. The woman out front said this was my aisle, but I can’t begin to imagine how one finds the particular spot.” Her gaze flicked up and down the aisle, as if expecting the required tomes to leap obligingly off the shelf in answer to her summons. When they did not, she looked back to Beth, and smiled.

She had a dimple in her left cheek.

“I’d be awfully obliged to you.”

Well. In that case.

Beth moved down the aisle on rubbery legs, the ground seeming to roll and dip and sway beneath her like the deck of a smallish ship on unfriendly seas. She stopped before the necessary section, put out her hand, then let it fall.

“Which . . . which particular type of . . . poison?”

“Oh, all sorts. This everything you’ve got?” The girl with the legs and the sunset-flaming hair and the wide, friendly eyes stood back to appraise the selection.

“Yes. They start here,” she indicated the place with her hand, “and end here.”

The twelve books encompassed by the indicated parameters found themselves rapidly extracted and stacked, _somehow_ , in the girl’s arms.

“Do you need any help?” Beth wondered.

The twin stacks of six books each parted, and a dazzling smile shone out between them.

“You’re a lamb,” declared the girl. “I only need a room, thanks. Do you have those? A place I can go to . . . to read?”

Beth led the way again, to the end of the stacks and off to the right, where the left-hand wall was marked with evenly-spaced doorknobs. This part of the library was not very well lit, so most patrons preferred the rooms nearer the front, but some instinct she did not fully understand bade Beth take the girl to the most remote study room, the one tucked away at the very end of the row.

“Marvelous,” breathed the girl balancing the books, and she plunged inside as though her burden weighed nothing at all.

Beth shut the door behind her, and went back to reshelving. She made two more trips to the front to reload her cart, and had been about twenty minutes at work before a slim figure bearing two stacks of books reappeared at the end of the aisle.

“Oh!” said the girl who held them. “Do they make you stay here, then? Filed away in purgatory, between poisons and Pythagoras?”

Beth surprised herself with a laugh, which was answered in kind by the girl who shone like the sun.

“There! You are not under a spell, at any rate. I thought you might be a prisoner of sorts, magically bound to help anybody who walked down your aisle, but I don’t think people who are bespelled can laugh. I’ll just put these back, and you can show me out.”

“Oh!” Beth stepped forward quickly. “No, thank you. You mustn’t. Myrtle would be furious.”

“Is Myrtle that impressive Gorgon who sent me back here to find you? I won’t cross her, then. I wouldn’t like to cross anybody who had done me such a service.”

The books she surrendered to Beth, who noted they were in exactly the correct order for reshelving. After replacing them, she turned to find the girl still standing there, waiting, as if she really did want Beth to show her out.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” she wondered, leading the way out of the stacks. Her companion nodded briskly.

“Yes, it was all very helpful. Thank you—” She broke off. “Goodness. I am in her debt and have not even the pleasure of her name. How am I to address my benefactress?”

Beth flushed. She could not exactly offer her hand while they were walking, but she managed to incline her head in a kind of sideways bow.

“Beth Hargreaves.”

“Miss Hargreaves. Enchanted. I am very much obliged to you. And to your magnificent Gorgon, for ensuring we met. You may even tell her so, though perhaps best not tell her I called her a Gorgon. She mightn’t like that. Instead I leave the precise phrasing to your discretion. I’ve no real discretion to speak of, but I can tell you’re just brimming over with the stuff.”

She paused on the threshold, turned to smile at Beth, and flung the door open to the early autumnal brilliance of the world beyond.

So bright and blinding was the light she admitted on doing so, Beth entirely lost sight of her for a moment. By the time the spots cleared, the girl was gone.

~*~

Cal Murphy arrived at the library much later than usual, possibly delayed by a stop at that particular manner of illicit establishment which caused his breath to smell strongly of drink. If Myrtle had been on hand Beth might have deferred to her greater authority in refusing him admittance, but he caught her quite on her own, and she did not like to imagine the scene that would ensue if she asked him to return in the morning. So she admitted him, gave him the law book, and then dodged quickly as he knocked it across the table with a dissatisfied bellow.

“How the hell’m I supposed to make head or tail of this!” he complained. “Might as well be Greek.” He looked around the nearly-deserted library with disgust. “What are you all doing in here, anyway? All these books and nothing in ‘em to help.”

He turned his focus back to Beth, who thought she’d better deflect as quickly as she could.

“Have—have you sought the counsel of a lawyer, Mr. Murphy?” she asked timidly. “A lawyer is trained to understand these matters, after all.”

“Think I can afford _that_?” he cried. “My business is going under. Got to sort it out on my own, haven’t I?”

Beth murmured apologetic assent. She glanced up at the clock, which showed closing time, and then at the two departing patrons who were clearly more cognizant of their duty regarding orderly departure than Mr. Murphy.

“Perhaps,” she said, “if you cared to return tomorrow—”

“What’s the use?” he snarled. “Not like you’ll have anything better for me then.”

He swayed uncertainly, and Beth wondered, a little desperately, who she could possibly call to fetch him home. She was not aware of there being a Mrs. Murphy, and for the sake of that hypothetical woman she rather hoped there was no such person. But mercifully Cal seemed to feel the call of the dinner hour on his own and, after casting another repulsed glance at the books, strode shakily but purposefully for the front doors.

The moment they swung to behind him, Beth flew to turn the bolt and complete the final rituals of her day. Fast as she moved, though, she was conscious of that depressive understanding that she was too far behind her regular schedule to meet her regular streetcar.

 _I needn’t rush_ , she told herself firmly, _there’s no earthly purpose_.

Yet she rushed all the same.

When she was done she was no closer to being able to make it to the corner on time—the streetcar would have passed ten minutes before—and she scolded herself for the futility of it all as she left the building.

 _Why did I even bother? There was no point_ —

But here she broke off, mid self-directed lecture, at the sight of a smoking, clanking, lumbering contraption staggering down the middle of the road.

It was enormous. Easily twice the size of a streetcar, maybe closer to three times as large. It seemed to be fashioned of iron or a similar metal, built in roughly the shape of a beast, with four stumbling legs and a kind of cagelike body mounted atop these, but whether or not there was an individual inside serving as pilot, Beth could not make out. Nor indeed was she inclined to try. The few people still on the street were fleeing with all possible speed, as the metal beast belched out noxious clouds of greeny-yellow steam in their wake.

Beth would certainly have taken to her heels in that moment too, except her attention was arrested by the sight of a slight form streaking in between the staggering legs of the thing. Beth could just make out a kind of golden-blue hue, and not much more, as the figure was moving faster than the naked eye could track.

First it was at the joint of one leg, then it was at the base of a different leg entirely. Then up at the joint of that, and down to another leg, and so on. The pattern was repeated with a kind of plucky, desperate aggression, and at first it seemed to be having no effect whatsoever. But all at once one jointed section—what Beth had deemed the knee of the mechanical beast’s off foreleg—gave a low, groaning creak and buckled.

It staggered a few more paces, bringing it to almost the very bottom of the library steps, and then, with a kind of smoking bellow, and a horrific creaking and grinding of metal parts, it collapsed. Beth clapped her hands to her ears and cringed back, staring. It had certainly not been alive, but its undoing came with what looked very like death throes all the same. The thing sent up another gust of steam where it lay, and all at once the blue figure was racing down the side of it like a mountain climber riding an avalanche.

“Watch out!” cried the figure. “Don’t stand in the way of the—”

Another gust of steam rushed toward the spot where Beth stood, but Beth was, quite suddenly, quite simply, not there anymore. She had been knocked aside by a blow that _should_ have hurt, should have stunned and pained her, but somehow, though it had all the force of an explosion, landed light as a feather.

Beth tumbled all of a heap on the green grass and scattered yellow leaves of the library lawn, wounded in no part save her dignity, and looked up just in time to see the blue-and-gold figure, standing exactly where moments ago Beth herself had stood, engulfed in a cloud of yellow-green steam.

She shot clear almost at once, leaping up, climbing toward the cage-like body and disappearing into the depths of the beast itself. Had she escaped the steam? Beth couldn’t tell. She got to her feet, standing well clear, until a deep, rhythmic wheeze within the machine was cut off. A low, deflating groan issued forth and the gusts of steam whistled away into nothingness.

Then, silence.

Beth inched forward.

“Hello?” she called.

The heap of creaking metal did not respond.

“Hello!” she called again, more firmly, and a gap of silence yawned.

Then, faintly, tapping.

Beth moved quickly around to the side of the mechanical that was reverberating with sound and found, with some difficulty, an external hatch. It took three tries to pry it up, and peer into the cavity beyond.

A masked face peered back. Wide, friendly eyes blinked rapidly in the gloom.

“Hello,” said Beth. “Can you move?”

“Yes,” said the Blue Flame. “Wait. No. Damn. The bellows collapsed on me when I shut them off; it’s like being swallowed in a wet balloon. Can’t brace against a thing in here.”

Beth leaned in and extended her arms.

“Can you catch hold of me?”

With twisting, grimacing difficulty, she did. Beth labored a moment, gasping, tugging, and then all in a rushing moment the Blue Frame fell free and Beth tumbled back toward the pavement.

She never hit it.

A warm pair of arms encircled her, and held her light and easy until she could get her feet under her properly. Then the Blue Flame stood back, cleared her throat, and said,

“Thanks.”

Beth nodded, and adjusted her skirt. She could not quite look her in the eye, so she focused on the costume instead. It was a marvel, all gleaming blue trimmed with gold and, she saw now, very slightly edged with crimson, so that when the Blue Flame took off at great speed she did rather resemble the pilot light of a modern gas stove.

Fitting, Beth thought, for such a modern kind of girl.

“It’s . . . it’s nothing, really,” she said, declaiming any need for gratitude. “And thank you, for knocking me aside.”

“Not at all,” said the Blue Flame. “You’d have been done for, if you’d inhaled any of that. I couldn’t let . . . well. Glad you’re all right,”

Beth searched the masked face of her rescuer. “Are _you_?”

The Blue Flame looked startled. As though it had not occurred to her that Beth might ask.

“I?”

Yes. When you pushed me clear—did _you_ breathe any of it?”

The Blue Flame cleared her throat. Before she could answer, a flicker of motion out of the corner of Beth’s eye caught her attention. A gleaming car glided around the corner to idle at the curb. Beth did not know a great deal about cars, but she knew enough to know that this one was no type of Model A Ford. Not even the town car. This car was in a class by itself.

“My ride,” said the Blue Flame. “Do excuse me.”

She fled to the vehicle in question in a blaze of blue and gold, edged with crimson. She opened her own door, and climbed inside.

The Blue Flame, Beth saw, had very nice legs.

~*~

“Owens,” said the Blue Flame, “do you believe in love at first sight?” She coughed raspishly. “Or second. First-and-a-half, if we’re doing averages. But first sight is what they talk about the most, isn’t it? I think there must be something in it.”

She tried to prop herself up, and could not quite manage without going off into tight spasms of coughing.

“What’s your view on the subject?”

Owens focused, imperturbably, on the smoking, spurting chemistry apparatus he had cobbled together at the behest of his mistress.

“It is a most compelling narrative trope, I believe, Madam.” He leaned in to adjust the flame of the Bunsen burner located beneath one especially bubbling vessel. “And popular in fiction.”

“I can see why,” said the Blue Flame. “Fair took my breath away. Or maybe that’s a side effect of the poison gas. Can’t remember exactly when it set in; I’m afraid the order of ceremonies is all going a bit iffy in my mind. Can still remember her face, though. Not a chance I’d forget that. All eyes and the most endearing little afterthought of a chin. Not a lot to say for herself, but even so . . . still waters, and all that. You could tell. And her eyes! Did I describe her eyes to you, Owens? Did I even attempt to? Perhaps that is what took my breath away. The impossibility of describing her eyes.”

Owens tactfully refrained from commenting on how much breath his mistress had left to spare, for one who fancied herself bereft. He said, “There was a comparison to the stars, I believe. On the drive home you likened them to the constellation of the Hesperides.”

“Did I?” The Blue Flame dropped her head back, reflecting. “I don’t remember that. Very poetic of me.”

“An effect of the toxin, I fear.”

“What,” said the Blue Flame. “Poetry?”

“The memory loss, Madam. Poetry is not a documented complication, to my knowledge. In any event, the antidote whose formula you devised following your research is now nearly prepared.”

“Oh, good.” The Blue Flame followed his efforts with her eyes, no longer troubling to lift her head. “It _is_ starting to go a bit dim in here. Don’t suppose I have more than a few minutes left. And it would be a real shame to die now that I’ve fallen in love.”

Owens adjusted a clamp on the apparatus.

“We will do our level best to ensure you gain the time needed to . . . effect a courtship.”

“Lord!” the Blue Flame gasped. “The way you say it. Like a business transaction, instead of a romance. This isn’t clerical, Owens! It’s not contractual. It’s a grand passion. You see before you a woman caught in the grip of abandoned adoration!”

“Indeed, Madam,” said Owens. “Also rictus.”

He drew off a small phial of the clear liquid distilled from his preparation.

“One of those, at least, it is within my power to correct.”

And he held it to her lips with a hand that did not shake, but looked as though it might have wanted to, if he had been free to make the extent of his worry truly known. The Blue Flame, for her part, grimaced and drank, and then fell back against the cushion with a tremor and a contortion of the limbs.

“Just in time, I think,” she tried to say, but could not, because the muscles of her jaw had clamped shut and the tremor took her. Owens, however, seemed to understand.

“The very nick of it,” he murmured, and sat stiffly in a chair pulled up beside the couch, the better to keep his vigil through the night.

~*~

Beth, in common with most of the newspaper-reading public, learned on Monday of the triumph of the Blue Flame over the schemes of that elusive fiend the press had dubbed the Alchemist, and was relieved. Though the extent of public relief did necessarily vary from household to household—and even, in the case of the Hargreaves home, within it.

“Not fit work for a woman,” sighed Mrs. Purvis, pouring out the tea at breakfast. She occupied that privileged position of a family retainer who would no sooner dream of leaving her place of employ than she would of hesitating to share with them her most frankly-spoken opinion. “Where she came from I can’t begin to guess. No good family, I should imagine.”

“But she’s providing a very valuable service nonetheless, don’t you think?” Beth ventured. She had just got through reading the somewhat redacted report in the _Home Circular_ , and was waiting for her father to finish with the _Post_ so she could indulge in the more complete details that had doubtless been carefully omitted from the slim publication meant for perusal by the more easily-shocked housewives of the region. “She has done remarkable things already.”

Mrs. Purvis looked unconvinced. Beth’s father, however, was nearing the end of his own reading and seemed more inclined to take her side of things.

“It’s not a conventional pastime, certainly,” he allowed. “But since these, er, uniquely capable individuals do seem to be turning up with greater frequency of late, I suppose it makes sense that the civic-minded of their number feel obliged to serve the public good. She has certainly started to make a nice little name for herself.”

“We could have had a man one, though, surely,” Mrs. Purvis fussed. “They’ve got a man one over in Twin Rivers, and my sister who lives in Centerville said theirs is a man, too. Iron Shadow, he’s called. And very dashing, or so they do say.”

“However could they tell, if he wears a mask?” Beth wondered. Mrs. Purvis declined to speculate. Mr. Hargreaves was now focused on the persona of the Alchemist, as documented by the _Post_ , and uninterested in the Iron Shadow, dashing or otherwise.

“He’s escaped capture, but she’s led police to his base of operation—the place where he was mixing the stuff. Old Hurley Farm, outside of town.”

“Now doesn’t that go to show that no good ever comes of letting a family farm go to ruin,” Mrs. Purvis moralized sadly.

“Perhaps not,” Beth’s father said mildly, “but not everybody is cut out for that life. Edmund Hurley is doing very well over at the college, or so I am told.”

“Being a farmer’s respectable enough for anybody,” Mrs. Purvis maintained. “What will come of these young people with their notions of education and betterment—and betterment is too generous a term for what happened to that Eliza, I don’t mind saying. First prize for tomatoes at the county fair would content many a decent girl, but not Eliza. No, she thought she’d marry a fine businessman, only look at her now!”

Neither Beth or her father looked at Eliza Hurley. Mr. Hargreaves was still engrossed in his paper, and Beth was hanging on his every word.

“All manner of deadly toxins retrieved from the barn. Brewed enough to have done the whole town in. Don’t suppose he’ll get the chance now.”

“She’s a hero, then,” Beth said firmly, and Mrs. Purvis, though not persuaded to voice agreement, was at least dissuaded from voicing objection. She carried out the breakfast things, still mourning the sad fate of the Hurley Farm, abandoned to the opportunism of a fiendish chemist who brewed poison gas and equipped moving mechanical giants with the means to disperse the stuff.

Beth dropped a kiss on her father’s head, and headed off to work.

~*~

The girl with the sunset hair returned midweek. Beth had not been expecting her, exactly, yet her heart gave an unaccountable leap at the sight of the figure in deep brown velvet and ochre silk flinging both doors wide and entering in a swirl of sunshine, woodsmoke and crisp, cool air. Her shoes gleamed like glossy chestnuts, and her cheeks were lit by the freshness of the world beyond.

Beth resisted the urge to inhale deeply at her approach.

“Plants, Miss Hargreaves!” the girl called. She did not falter in her stride, but spoke as she walked, the narrative punctuated by the clip of her heels. “The study of, that is. Botany. I know it’s unbearably rude of me to just turn up this way and tell you what botany is, I am sure you knew that already and I am sure there are many other things I ought to do first. I should ask after your health since last we met—first we met, come to that—and I should thank you again for the service you rendered. Certainly I should compliment you on that shade of mauve and its most flattering effect on your complexion, for truly you are the image of a rose garden and you make me long for the freedom to tarry and breathe in every sweet promise of your company, but cruel is the truth that I’ve time for none of that as I need everything you have on plants. I am afraid I actually needed it an hour ago, but unless you are hiding the secret of time travel under that desk, this very moment will have to do instead.”

Beth followed this litany with remarkably little difficulty. She blinked at the right spots, blushed at the wrong ones, and as the narrator drew abreast of her she turned, still listening, and led the way to the corresponding aisle in the reference section.

It was of a complexity and proportion appropriate for the kind of charming little town whose households kept all manner of pretty gardens, and it derailed even the steamrolling conversation of the girl who sought it.

“Gosh,” she said. Her mouth hung open and she turned in a slow circle, evincing a kind of appreciative horror. “That’s . . . a bit much. Better narrow it down. What have you got on vines and creepers?”

Beth indicated the corresponding section, which had nine books.

“Much better,” declared her patron, and seized them all in a group. “Same room still open?”

Once she had settled the girl and her reading material in the same remote chamber as before, Beth stood away from the door, but did not return to her work. Instead she waited. When the girl burst forth fifteen minutes later, books once more stacked as they had been given to her, Beth said, “You _can_ check them out, you know. If you need more time to finish them all.”

“A library loan won’t buy me the kind of time I need at the moment, I’m afraid,” she sighed, and returned the books to Beth’s waiting arms. “But you are the soul of sympathetic support, Miss Hargreaves, and I salute you for it.”

And she really did salute. Right there in the back corridor lined with reading rooms. It was a kind of chipper little two-fingered affair, snappy and a bit saucy, and Beth thought it suited the girl who offered it down to the ground.

“Walk me out again?” she wondered, and Beth found herself replacing the stack of botany books on the nearest reshelving cart and saying yes, of course she would.

It took her the entire journey from the reading room to the front door to muster the nerve, but as the girl with the hair like a sunset put her hand on the door, Beth managed to ask:

“What’s _your_ name?”

“Oh, did I not give it? No, of course, I’d have introduced myself to your beautiful Cerberus instead, when last I was in. I’m Priscilla, Miss Hargreaves.” She put out her hand, and caught Beth’s within it. Her grip was warm, even through her glove, and firm. It was invigorating. Beth, at least, certainly felt invigorated at the contact. “Priscilla Blythe.”

“How do you do,” Beth said, rather more faintly than she had intended. “Pleased to meet you.”

Priscilla smiled brilliantly, and the dimple made its appearance.

“I assure you, Miss Hargreaves, the pleasure is mine.”

Then she was out the doors again, into the ascendant crimsons and sunlight of the season, and once again, as before, Beth somehow missed the moment of seeing her go.

~*~

“Good lord, Owens,” said the Blue Flame. She sank back against the richly supportive cushions of the Duesenberg and clutched at her limbs, as if to verify their continued attachment to her body. Owens, piloting the vehicle, cleared his throat.

“Indeed, Madam.”

The Blue Flame was silent for an unusual stretch of time. She seemed to be struggling to catch her breath. They were nearly back to the outskirts of town when she made her next observation.

“That was . . . touch and go.”

Owens nodded feelingly.

“It was a narrow escape in every respect, Madam, there can be no denying it.”

The Blue Flame sat up a little straighter, and Owens, noting this sign of improvement, directed a greater portion of his attention to the road than had heretofore been the case. The Blue Flame rubbed a thoughtful circle around the upper part of her thigh, as if to erase the phantom grip that lingered there.

“What can the man have been playing at, growing that . . . that _creature_ in the field? Did he mean to keep it as a pet? It seemed practically sentient at times.”

“It was possibly intended to serve as a defense of the property,” Owens suggested.

“No doubt. But surely most people just keep dogs!”

“The ways of the diabolical mastermind are not our ways, Madam, it’s true,” Owens agreed, guiding the vehicle off the main road onto a pretty country road bordered by wild asters and intermittent copses of chattering poplars. A neatly-lettered sign posted at the turnoff declared it a private lane, and requested all readers to refrain from trespass.

The Blue Flame’s shoulders straightened at the sight of their surroundings.

“I thought it had me there at the end,” she said quietly. “I don’t mind saying so.”

“Your application of the concentrated solution was judiciously timed. A most decided turning point in the—ehm—altercation.”

“It certainly didn’t like the stuff.” She examined the empty contraption she held. It bore a striking resemblance to an atomizer, but was larger than the average watering can. “Who knew salt and soap were such anathema to climbing vines?”

“It was a masterstroke of logic, Madam, preparing the solution in such proportions as to effectively combat the specimen. However did you think of it?”

The Blue Flame set her atomizer aside, and permitted a smile to play across the generous mouth that was the only part of her face visible when she wore her mask.

“I read it in a book.”

~*~

**Blue Flame Mows Down Blooming Menace! Masked Maiden Triumphs!**

The headline captured Beth’s attention as she was waiting for the streetcar. She traded the newsboy two pennies for the publication, and anticipated with pleasure the chance to read the feature story on her ride home.

She was not the only one.

“Marvelous, that girl,” decided an earnest, roundish woman seated to Beth’s left. Her cloche hat shielded the side of her face from view, but enough of it was still visible that Beth could make out her wide-eyed perusal of the same story in her own paper. “Some climbing plant, or creeper, took over a field at that Alchemist’s lair in the country—moving about like it were alive! Started grabbing at the policemen still guarding the place and trapped one of them something terrible, I guess. And she went out to fight it, with nothing but her own self and a little thing she squirted on it! Can you credit the like!”

Beth took in this narrative with polite attention, agreed that the Blue Flame really did seem to be doing her level best to keep their community safe from all manner of peril, and then settled in to read the article for herself.

The journalist had not stinted his admiration for the subject.

> A fine and unassuming figure she makes in her trim little leotard, fashioned in colors of blue and gold edged in scarlet. She does not fly, but she moves with such speed the eye can hardly track her. Only the mighty, punishing grip of the vine that ensnared her brought her to a halt, but that, not for long. A mysterious weapon, all glass and gleaming silver, did she wield. A jet of liquid emitted from the device cowed the herbaceous fiend, and subsequent applications of the same brought it low.

A few paragraphs followed detailing accounts given by onlookers, who had apparently pulled over to the side of the highway at the sight of the vine making its presence known, and Beth read them all with keen attention before the streetcar arrived at her stop.

> Mr. and Mrs. John Abbott of Centerville were en route to visit Mrs. Abbott’s sister when Mr. Abbott spotted the vine, and pulled off the highway to ascertain it would be safe to proceed.
> 
> “I never did see such a thing,” Mr. Abbott is overheard to have declared to his wife.
> 
> Mrs. Abbott also professed her attention caught by the bravery of the Blue Flame, and when pressed to make a comparison between our hometown heroine and Centerville’s Iron Shadow, confided that, while her own allegiance must necessarily lie with the Shadow, she had not previously imagined a “young lady hero” could perform so capably under such extremity of circumstance.

The exotic flavor of out-of-town visitors having been dispensed with, the reporter then turned his attention to the earthier, local element, represented in the person of Amos Browdy, farmer, and Mrs. Calvin Murphy, housewife.

Mr. Browdy, whose family connections in the region were first carefully documented, said he guessed the Blue Flame had done well, and he hoped the seeds of the thing she’d mowed down would not find their way into his fields. This sparse reflection was somewhat embellished by a few pretty phrases from the reporter about his careworn face and the stern, sturdy stuff of a which a man like Mr. Browdy must be made, so Beth imagined Mr. Browdy had been laconic in the extreme.

Mrs. Calvin Murphy, introduced as the wife of a local businessman, described herself as “knowing a thing or two about plants” and advised the public that the one conquered by the Blue Flame was “not in the usual way of being a plant,” given that it had tried to strangle the young lady by lifting her bodily from the ground. This, she asserted, was unique in her experience of plants.

So there _was_ a Mrs. Murphy, after all, Beth noted, and in contrast to her husband she appeared to be a master of the understatement.

Her remaining commentary was sparse, restricted to a couple lines about how unsettled she had been to observe the vine menacing the officers of the law, and the statements themselves seemed fragmentary. Beth supposed that if Mrs. Murphy were inclined to air the same grievances as her husband, the relevant lines might well have been skillfully excised from a much lengthier tirade about the development of the interurban line and its threat to their way of life.

Really, Beth thought, it must be a very tiresome thing to be a reporter, and have to pick out the relevant parts from all the noise people would insist on flinging at you, or persuade the Mr. Browdys of the world to give enough commentary that you could at least stretch it into a complete sentence.

There was no quote from the Blue Flame. Beth had not really expected it, as it did not seem to be the nature of that type of person, to stand around and give quotes to reporters, but Beth was disappointed all the same. This secretive second-identity business meant one had to content oneself with the observations of bystanders, and Beth, having too recently been a bystander herself, felt the newspaper report lacked much of the immediacy that she knew came with such an event in real time.

When the streetcar reached her stop, she walked home more than usually lost in thought, not particularly minding her step on the grey boards of the sidewalk or stopping to do more than wave in mechanical response to the friendly greetings of various neighbors from behind their neat, white picket fences.

“Good evening, dear!” Mrs. Purvis called, as Beth turned in at the gate. She completed an energetic sweeping-off of the porch, and untied her apron. “How was work today?”

“Illuminating,” said Beth thoughtfully, and walked slowly inside the house.

~*~

When Beth went down to supper she found her father seated at the table, a cold meal already arranged before him.

“Is Mrs. Purvis unwell?” she asked, in some concern. Her father was quick to set her mind at ease.

“She’s asked for the evening off. Visiting family. I thought it made no difference, given that tomorrow is her usual and we won’t need her for Saturday supper, either.”

“Why, what happens Saturday?” Beth wondered, settling herself in her seat across the table and lifting the napkin on her own salad plate. Her father looked up in surprise.

“Founders’ Dinner, Betty. Don’t tell me you’d forgotten.”

Beth had, and was surprised at herself. Usually the Founders’ Dinner was a highlight of her autumn, as it had been the first really grown-up social event she had ever attended and she still anticipated it with equal parts excitement and fond nostalgia. Hosted jointly by the college and the Chamber of Commerce, invitations were customarily extended to all members and influential supporters of local industry, all three college campuses, and other notables in the community.

“It completely slipped my mind,” she confessed. “Work, I suppose.”

Her father nodded.

“Yes, you’ve really taken to the library, haven’t you? I’m pleased. I hadn’t been sure, at first, that it was the right sort of thing, pushing you out into the world that way, but I thought a library might be just the ticket. You’ve always been one for . . . erm . . . reflection. Quiet, and all that.” He gave her the kind of affectionate, confused smile that often marked his attempts to understand how he had produced such an individual. Beth answered with a small smile of her own.

“It’s a livelier place than one might think,” she said. “But I don’t mind. You meet the most interesting people.”

She hesitated, then added, “yesterday, for instance. I met a person called Blythe. She seems to live locally, and yet I don’t know the name. I don’t think there are any Blythes around here, are there?”

“Well, not anymore,” her father said thoughtfully. “You’d have been just a sprout when it happened. Some upset with funding allocation at the college, and Blythe claiming he had been done out of the oversight he was due. They left after that.”

“He was a professor there?”

“No, no,” Beth’s father brushed her query from the air with a little wave of his hand. “Nothing of the kind. They’re one of our older families.”

 _Money_ , Beth’s comprehension filed neatly in the space her father left carefully void of crass, commercial allusions at the supper table.

“Blythe endowed a series of laboratories at the college. Had his own kind of project going at the same time, and got to pick the best of the . . . well. Research assistants, regulations surrounding use of equipment, and a great many other decisions normally made by higher ups were left in his hands.”

“Is that usual?” Beth wondered. Her father said no, decidedly not.

“But it was a unique circumstance. Anything he wanted, he got. Because he wasn’t only funding his projects, he was funding theirs, too.” Then he cleared his throat, as if the accidental descent into the topic of money had stuck awkwardly in his throat along with a morsel of potato salad.

“What happened, then? Did they stop letting him make the decisions?”

“Not that he was told. But the claim he put about was that he had been cut out of a key decision and funding had gone in some untoward direction. Something he wouldn’t have approved, if he had known about it. When he felt they weren’t taking his displeasure in the spirit he felt they should, he packed it all up and left.”

“I see.” Beth toyed with her fork, her focus divided between the physical and intellectual appetites whetted by the food and conversation. “When did that happen, exactly, can you remember?”

Her father was vague as to the month, but named a year that would have coincided with Beth’s entry at the grammar school. Beth thanked him and gave herself over to the physical appetite, clearing her plate methodically and thinking all the while.

~*~

The next day at work Beth entertained Myrtle’s anticipation of the Founders’ Dinner with customary politeness and unusual inattention. Her thoughts kept drifting to the newspaper archives kept near the back of the library, and at first opportunity she seized a stage prop of a stocking cart and fled.

The newspaper archives were seldom required. That week’s papers, stored nearer the front, were more usually in demand, but the section Beth sought was quite deserted and she was able to move the necessary files to the nearest table without being observed.

She set aside the _Home Circular_ in favor of the _Post_ and _Clarion_. The _Post_ was good for a solid factual recount, but she wanted the _Clarion’s_ flair for atmosphere and embellishment to enhance her understanding of the general feeling at the time.

Luck was on her side; she found it in the second month she checked. In late 1914 the _Post_ recounted a dry tale of a fundraising drive put on to benefit the local college. The _Clarion_ , a day later, gave a colorful depiction of the efforts undertaken to that end, and woven among the praise directed at the efforts made several allusions to “disgruntled parties” and an “acrimonious parting of ways” as having preceded these efforts.

Having found the date, she turned at last to the _Home Circular_ and read from that point on until, in a publication dated May 1, 1915, she located the relevant paragraph under Town and Society.

> Today Mr. and Mrs. Roger Blythe depart with their family for the Continent, where they will make their new home. Mr. Blythe intends to pursue private research interests and Mrs. Blythe, who is English by birth, anticipates reacquainting herself with the society of her childhood. There is no anxiety over the crossing, as Mrs. Blythe recounts with pride that she is the daughter of a British Admiral and anticipates that young Henry, Edward and Priscilla will live up to the fine tradition of their heritage by proving hearty sailors all.

Beth’s stomach rolled, but she obliged herself to continue the hunt until the final relevant publication, dated a week later. She skimmed it quickly, conscious of some illogical sense of trespass. It was a public document, available to all. Why did she feel like she was lifting the lid on somebody’s coffin?

Perhaps, she thought, because in essence she was.

She noted the names listed, and was on the verge of sitting back when her eye drifted from the column listing deaths to that recounting marriages, and quite another surprise recorded there. She sat back in a cloud of grief and perplexity, all intermingled, and closed the paper. For a moment she tried to understand why it mattered—because it did, somehow, she was very sure of it. But could it matter as much as what had driven her to open the papers in the first place?

In a sudden burst of discomfort, she rushed to replace them all in their archival sleeves. These she stored in the correct location, and returned, on slightly wobbly legs, to the front of the library once more.

She had not anticipated any further development, but near the end of her workday, as she was listening to a patron explain why he should not have to pay for the book onto which he had spilled a bowl of soup, Priscilla walked in.

“Yes, very well, all right, we’ll cover it,” Beth said quickly, and left the startled individual mid-argument to dart around the desk and then pause, suddenly uncertain of the best next course of action.

Priscilla saved her the trouble.

“Miss Hargreaves,” she said. “I come again as a supplicant to Mercury, seeking the delivery of a message with all speed. I am in need of books on metallurgy, and I can think of none I would rather have lead me to them than you.”

Beth did not at once leap into action, nor did she speak. Instead she stared up into Priscilla’s face. It was, as she had noted from first meeting, a most friendly and inviting face. There was a wry little twist to one corner of the mouth, as though everything she said might be half a joke on herself, but it was never bound to be a joke on the person to whom she said it because the eyes were simply too kind.

And . . . sad.

You could see better, in the light, how sad they were. It made a terrible kind of sense, but Beth still lowered her gaze to stop seeing it.

“Miss Hargreaves?” said Priscilla, and made it a question.

Beth, buoyed with nerves and nervousness at everything that having the nerve to actually ask her might lead to, swallowed. She looked up again, and lost her nerve.

“Yes, of course. This way.”

When the correct section had been found, Priscilla made her selection. She retreated to the room as usual, and Beth hovered just outside the door. She longed, above almost anything else, to press her eye to the keyhole and attempt to discern the activity beyond the door. But to do so seemed an inexcusable violation, not just of the ordinary sort of privacy a patron might expect, but something deeper than that.

If she looked in to discern what Priscilla was doing now, it felt as though she would be closing a door on some other possibility. Something Beth could not even put into words, but the hope of which she wanted, above all else, to preserve.

So she stood, and she waited, and when Priscilla walked out ten minutes later aglow with triumph and, Beth thought, possibly something more than that—she really was almost _glowing_ —she asked her outright.

“Do you really read all of them?”

Now, Beth saw, it was Priscilla’s turn to hesitate. Priscilla’s turn to understand that a lie would be easier, but might also close the door on a possibility of which she did not want to rob herself.

She nodded.

“Yes.”

Beth drew and let an enormous breath.

“I thought so.”

She opened her mouth again and Priscilla quickly flung up an imploring hand.

“Miss Hargreaves, please. Don’t. I couldn’t . . .” She clutched the books tighter. “I should hate, above all things, to dissemble to you.”

“I should hate it, too,” Beth said softly. “I don’t mean to . . . I only wanted to ask, you said your name . . .” She took a deep breath. “Will you be attending the Founders’ Dinner tomorrow?”

The twist beside Priscilla’s mouth pulled into something less like humor and more like a grimace.

“Blythes have a standing invitation to the thing. I hadn’t thought to use mine.”

“Yes, and of course you needn’t, if you don’t wish to. But I’d thought—I hoped, even, that you might be. I’ll be going too, with my father, and I thought maybe . . .” But whatever Beth had thought seemed not ready to be spoken aloud. It curled up protectively in the middle of her chest instead. Thankfully, even without hearing it, Priscilla seemed to soften with understanding.

“Oh—yes. Quite.” She put out the hand not wrapped around the books, and rested it ever so lightly on Beth’s. “I will look for you there.”

Something fizzed all down Beth’s arms, light and bubbly. It filled her chest and her head and she did not fully realize it had also reached her face until she saw the look of transfixed wonder on Priscilla’s face.

“I’ve made you smile,” she said. “I . . . I _am_ glad.” Then she looked down at the books she held, and said, “Where can I leave them, Miss Hargreaves? For I hope you will again agree to walk me out.”

They walked more slowly, this time. Priscilla still moved with purpose, but no marked speed. Beth stole glances up at her as they walked, and twice found Priscilla was looking back. The fizzing all through her limbs brightened, and by the time they reached the door she was smiling again.

Priscilla did not vanish with an autocratic bang of the doors this time, but hovered, uncharacteristically uncertain, and stared a very long moment at Beth’s face. Finally she said,

“Do you know, if you had looked at me like that the first day I met you . . . I don’t think I’d have been able to leave.”

Then she put out her hand again, brushed her fingers lightly over Beth’s wrist, and slipped out the door before Beth could even think of a reply.

~*~

Beth’s commute that evening was completed in a confused, happy cloud of anticipation. She scarcely felt the tug and snap of the wind encroaching on her stockinged legs, nor minded the bluster of it through the late-day disarrangement of her hair as she climbed aboard the streetcar and let it rattle her off toward home.

When she reached the gate she shut it with a kind of declarative triumph, and skipped up the front steps as she had not done since her very late girlhood.

Her father was not home yet, nor did she expect him for another half hour at least. He liked to linger on Fridays, the better to let traffic clear before he started home. Instead she ate alone, then went up to her bedroom to labor over her choice of outfit for the following night, flipping back and forth between two in particular before settling quite firmly on one, arranging it with all necessary accessories for final evaluation, and then abruptly pivoting to settle on a third choice that had been eliminated during the very earliest selection rounds.

She scarcely knew herself by the time the sound of her father’s step on the bottom stair jerked her from her reverie and he called up to say he was sitting down to dinner, and ask if she had eaten.

Beth assured him she had, then stepped out into the hallway to lean down over the balcony and ask,

“Do you know Priscilla Blythe is back in town?”

His look of confusion might have owed itself in equal parts to hunger and genuine incomprehension.

“Roger Blythe’s daughter,” Beth added. Her father’s expression cleared.

“Is she, now? Yes, I suppose she’d be of age. The property must have come to her. Was that who you met at the library?”

“Yes.” Beth paused, wiggling her toes in the hallway rug. The next question wanted a bit of careful framing. “And the Blythe property itself—is that near the old Hurley Farm?

“Oh, I think so,” her father said, frowning. The call of his dinner clearly did not balance well with this geography problem. “Within the half mile, anyhow. Why?”

“I shouldn’t like it if she had been upset by that business with the vine,” Beth said, and though it was not a lie, she still suffered a pang of guilt that it was not altogether the truth. Fortunately it seemed ample explanation for her father, who smiled and said he liked to think that Beth had made a friend.

Then he retreated in search of his supper, and Beth went downstairs to use the telephone.

Tomorrow, she needed to pay a call.

~*~

Mrs. Purvis lived in a snug, neatly-kept cottage in a slightly newer part of town. At least, Beth had always heard it called such, though the dwellings there had still been built before she had lost all her baby teeth. The home was spared from an almost painful air of respectability by friendly touches of a modest garden within the picket fence, lace curtains in the front window and a cheery yellow cushion on the seat of the little rocking chair that adorned the diminutive front porch.

Beth’s knock went unanswered, so she tried again. She was about to try a third time when the door opened and she was met by Mrs. Purvis, who welcomed her in with apologies.

“I didn’t hear you the first time,” she said, ushering Beth into the sitting room beside the door. “But that’s how it can be, when Sadie and I get to chatting.”

Beth, following the indicative nod, saw that Mrs. Purvis was in company with a shortish man and tallish woman. The remains of coffee and rolls were in evidence on the low table between them, but not cleared away, which was very unlike Mrs. Purvis. The conversation must have been engrossing indeed.

“We’re terrible for it, to be sure,” agreed the lady. She had an angular face made soft and pleasant by her smile. “How my poor Johnny can stand it I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Ah, well, now,” said the man thusly addressed. He smiled fondly at the self-deprecating Sadie, turning up an enormous old-fashioned handlebar mustache as he did. “I do like to see you so happy.”

“Beth,” Mrs. Purvis said, “may I introduce my sister Sadie, and her husband Mr. John Abbott? They have come to stay a few days.”

Beth nodded mechanically in reply, but her thoughts tugged sideways at the introduction of the pair. She had heard that name before, surely. Somewhere else. Somewhere recently . . .

“Of course!” she said. “You were at the Hurley farm when that dreadful business with the vine took place.”

“Imagine you knowing that!” Mrs. Abbott said warmly. “We had only just been telling Flossie about it. She’d no idea.”

“I read it in the paper,” Beth explained, “but I hadn’t understood at the time it was you. Mrs. Purvis only speaks of you as Sadie.”

“I’m not much of one for papers myself,” Mrs. Purvis confessed. “I’d no notion Sadie and John had been there. I knew about Amos Browdy, of course, because his daughter told me at the grocery, and Eliza Murphy can’t stop carrying on about it so there was no mistaking her.”

“Yes, her car was simply flying down the lane when we passed it,” Sadie laughed. “Goodness I had forgotten what she was like until she nearly struck us broadside, and then tried to make out it was John’s fault for being in the road at all. But then the Blue Flame arrived and she was—oh, Sadie, really, she was a marvel!” Her face lit up pleasurably at the very recollection. “I know I have spoken so highly of our Iron Shadow, and I do think he’s quite magnificent, but why, so is she!”

“I’d not have credited it,” Mr. Abbott agreed easily, “but she’s the goods.”

Beth, listening to this recount, was suddenly suffused with an almost absurd affection for both of them. That they could so easily see how wonderful . . . well, but of course who couldn’t? Even so, she felt bound to say she appreciated their appreciation for the Blue Flame.

“That reporter seemed eager to hear us say so too,” Sadie said, and Mrs. Purvis marveled again that they had been witness to such an event without her knowing.

“Just think, you being interviewed by a reporter! Now of course if you are in the paper, Sadie, I will need to make a clipping,” Mrs. Purvis said. Then she looked at Beth with ill-disguised curiosity. “What was it that you wanted to see me about? Your father isn’t unwell, is he? I’d be very glad to come in, if—”

“No, no,” Beth said hastily, “I’d never ask—he’s quite well, thank you.” This was more conversation than Beth was used to being conductress of, and it was starting to overwhelm her. On top of that it felt like something new had slipped into the threads of everything she was trying to gather up, but she couldn’t figure out what, and it was flustering her. Beth was so rarely flustered, she hardly knew what to do. It was a dreadful feeling.

“I actually wanted to ask—this is going to seem very odd, I’m afraid.” She looked apologetically at Mr. and Mrs. Abbott, who seemed so beautifully kind and ordinary, not at all the kind of accidental witnesses to her query she would have chosen, “but what actually became of old Mr. Hurley? The farm is abandoned, I know, but _why_?”

Mrs. Purvis looked suddenly guarded.

“Beth,” she said, “I don’t think—”

“Oh but it’s important!” Beth said. “At least I think it must be. Because there was no notice of his death when I thought there would be. He was still alive. So _did_ he die? Because if not—”

“He is dead,” said Mrs. Purvis brusquely. “He died last year.”

She looked to her company, then back to Beth, who was standing there, waiting, clutching her pocketbook in ill-concealed impatience and the agony of nearly-knowing but not being sure, and needing to know.

“He was in a . . . very suitable place. Very safe. They saw to it, of course. Best of care. And rightly so, very proper. But there was no question of his being allowed to remain in society. He was not well.”

The circumspection of what was not spoken was now that of scrupulous good manners, and it did not pain Beth as _wondering_ had done. She exhaled all in a rush, and nodded.

“Yes,” she said, “all right then. Thank you, Mrs. Purvis. That—thank you. That’s exactly what I needed to know.”

Then she declined coffee, told Mr. and Mrs. Abbott how truly pleased she was to have met them, and took her leave.

~*~

The night fell clear and chilly. Beth had a plush wrap and her father was warm and solid beside her as he escorted her up the steps to the main event hall of the college, but nevertheless she felt cold.

 _Nerves_ , she told herself. _Only nerves. You’ll get past it_.

But the chill only intensified as she surrendered her wrap to the coat check and moved further into the room.

Everybody was there. Absolutely everybody. Myrtle, resplendent in plum satin, with a corsage nestled to one side of her collar, clasped both Beth’s hands in hers and told Mr. Hargreaves how fortunate they were to have Beth’s help at the library. She even looked like she might mean it, Beth noted, with a kind of staggered wonder. Myrtle was so stinting in her praise and exacting in her demands at work, it had honestly never occurred to Beth that she might feel some kind of genuine appreciation for her.

Her father’s reply was lost in the chatter around them, and Beth shifted, turning, trying to see . . .

“Goodness it’s Calvin Murphy,” Myrtle said. “I suppose he _is_ still a member.”

Cal Murphy had dressed for the occasion, and looked every bit as uncomfortable as Beth had felt when he harangued her for law books. At his side was, presumably, Mrs. Murphy. She was of a height with him, and declined to hold his arm or even acknowledge him in any particular way at all, but rather scanned the crowd with a kind of brittle purpose.

“I am surprised,” Myrtle added thoughtfully. “That they are here together. He confided in me today when he came to return the books he borrowed that he had a different notion in mind than we first imagined, Beth. He said if he can secure a doctor's assessment of Mrs. Murphy’s condition, he wishes . . .” she broke off, and appeared suddenly aware that the kind of usual gossip might not be suitable to share in front of Beth’s father. He, however, came to her rescue unblinkingly.

“He has retained my counsel,” he said, “in pursuit of the matter he discussed with you.”

Myrtle sighed, and nodded.

“Runs in the family,” she said, cryptically. “The father, too. I am glad he is seeing to it sooner than later. That was their mistake with the old man. Ah! Well. We all have our trials. I will go say hello,” she decided, and appeared to draw herself up to something like battle height. “He is a patron of the library, after all, and I must acknowledge his support.” Then she sailed away, truly majestic with purpose, and Beth was surprised at her own rush of affection for the sight.

“She seems quite taken with you,” Beth’s father said warmly, smiling down at her. “Speaks to her sound judgement, I think.” He looked out over the crowd, considering. “Should we—”

Beth tugged sharply on his arm. She hadn’t meant to, but she couldn’t help herself. Because there, in the doorway, glittering in deep blue spangled silk, her hair glowing warm and rich and bright under the electric lights, was Priscilla.

She sighted Beth and beamed, crossing at once to put out both hands, and Beth took them like it was just the most ordinary thing in the world.

Releasing them again was markedly less so.

“May I . . .” Beth struggled around the too-familiar words. “Miss Blythe, may I present my father, Gerald Hargreaves? Dad, this—this is Priscilla Blythe.”

“Miss Blythe,” her father said, and Beth could breathe again. The introduction was so lovely and normal that it seemed surreal, compared to everything that had happened lately.

“I knew your father,” he said, and Priscilla visibly tensed, but his ensuing smile was followed by, “and remember him fondly. If it’s not too late to say, I am very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” said Priscilla, and turned her smile back to Beth. Wide, warm, and glad. Glad of _her_. “I am sorry I hadn’t the chance to know your daughter growing up, Mr. Hargreaves, but the recovery of that loss has been one of my greatest pleasures these weeks past. I hope to see much more of her in the days to come.”

Beth knew she’d better do something sensible before her head spun entirely around and she forgot what she’d meant to say.

“Dad,” she said, a little hoarsely, “can I just . . . I only need a moment to speak—”

Her father quite agreeably stepped away, leaving Beth to turn and look searchingly, urgently, into Priscilla’s face.

“I won’t ask you to lie to me,” she said. “It would be unkind. But I won’t . . . I can’t pretend to you, either. So please, just . . . the Alchemist. Do you think it might be Mrs. Murphy?”

Priscilla stared in perfect blankness. Beth’s face heated but she plunged on.

“She was Eliza Hurley. I’d no idea until—well it was recently. I saw her marriage notice in the paper, right beside . . .” She broke off, unevenly. Couldn’t very well say _your parents’ obituaries_ in a situation like this. “I saw her maiden name. She was Mr. Hurley’s daughter. And he was . . . put away. Did you know? I hadn’t, but it makes sense. These things can run in families, can’t they? What if knowing that her husband’s business was being put aside caused her to . . . to act? Somehow? In revenge.”

Priscilla was still mostly blank. But there was a flicker of something in her eyes, and Beth rushed desperately on.

“And today I found out she was _there_. Not just passing the farm, she was leaving it. Some people saw her. And she said she knows plants . . . oh it sounds foolish when I say it now! But do you suppose?”

Priscilla drew a long, slow breath. Then, very gently, she put her hand on Beth’s.

“Please,” she said, “excuse me.”

Then she turned and walked away, leaving Beth standing quite alone, blinking furiously, fighting the awful scrunching feeling in her throat that spoke of dangerously close tears.

Her father rejoined her, assuming her tête-à-tête had ended, and reclaimed her arm. He steered her away, his escort served her through another round of introductions, smiling and nodding, waiting, wondering . . .

“. . . not going to see you at the college then?”

He was speaking to her. The gentleman with the sandy hair and polite smile was looking at her, waiting for a reply. What had the question . . ?

“Beth is currently employed at the town library,” her father said, coming to her rescue. “If she wanted to enter the college, of course I’d send her along directly. But I don’t think your chemistry lab is quite in her line of things, Edmund. She’s more by way of being the literary type.”

“I would not dream of deriding her for it,” the gentleman promised.

“That friend of yours, though, Beth, might be more by way of being a chemist, hmm?” her father suggested. “Bound to be. It’s in her blood.”

“What friend is that?” the gentleman, Edmund, wondered, and the fizzing went all down Beth’s arms again, but this time it was a little too fast, a little too skittery.

She should stop her father. Should say something. There was something here she needed to remember, needed to understand, and until she worked out what it was he mustn’t be allowed to say—

“Beth has joined forces with the Blythe girl,” her father said. His arm was warm and solid under her hand. He was so absolutely steady. He wasn’t the kind of person who could even understand the feeling that was curling all around Beth now. Some creeping recognition, a pattern, something she had known was playing out but hadn’t been able to name.

“Roger’s child?” There was no mistaking the startled chill in Edmund’s voice. Because, of course, Priscilla’s father had funded that department, and then he had left, and taken his money with him. What had her father said? Packed it all up . . .

Had he taken it overseas?

That was it. The part that had eluded her until now. She landed on it with a bang. The research. Had he left it, or taken it? She looked up, the question tight inside her chest, and before her the person best to answer it. She could ask him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “if this brings up a painful or discouraging memory for you, Mr.—”

“Hurley,” he supplied, smiling, and the eyes were twinkling, enjoying that he had discerned she had been inattentive, that he’d needed to supply the name her father must surely have already given her when she’d been presented, but too distracted by Priscilla to notice.

Too distracted trying to send Priscilla after one Hurley to remember that she’d known for days there was another, and he was standing right in front of her.

The tightness in her chest no longer came from within, but without.

“Oh,” she said faintly. He was waiting for the question, she had to ask the question, or he would know something was amiss. She struggled to shape the words.

“Is—when Mr. Blythe . . . absconded,” yes, the word was good, let him presume her sympathy, “did he . . . were you very set back, in your pursuits? The work at the college is so important, my father has told me so many times. I’d hate to think you lost anything of great value.”

The shadow that darkened Edmund Hurley’s face made her think for a moment that she had been unwise to even pursue that line of inquiry at all. But then it passed, and he nodded curtly.

“Everything. Gone. Sunk to the bottom of the blasted . . .” he stopped, and regained his composure with an effort. “Ah, well. It’s been time enough that I should be past it. But I am an academic, you see, Miss Hargreaves, and it does not sit well with me that we should suffer such a loss.”

“Of course,” Beth whispered, and thought she might even sound sympathetic.

“It was a greater personal betrayal for me, of course,” Edmund Hurley added, as if attempting to justify his lingering resentment. “He was my mentor. Had encouraged me to leave the farm, and pursue an academic career. If not for him . . . well.” He sighed. “I suppose I have a few things to thank him for, after all.”

Then he smiled at them both, and it should have been all right. Should have been normal. But as Beth stepped away again, her hand still balanced on her father’s arm, it was feeling less and less like it was all right and more like they were on the brink of something she couldn’t hold back.

She was greeted by two other people whose faces she did not register. She was too far focused inward now, wondering how to find Priscilla having already driven her away, to alert her that possibly there was a mistake, that maybe Mrs. Murphy—

Mrs. Murphy.

Like a point of light at the end of a long dark tunnel, Mrs. Murphy appeared in Beth’s line of sight. She was standing off to one corner, looking left and right, and then starting through a discreet service door set in the wall. Beth’s hand slipped from her father’s arm. She might have called her excuses, or perhaps not. She only knew she walked, almost ran, across the floor, chasing the vanishing figure, reaching the door a minute after Mrs. Murphy had passed through it.

Putting her hand on the push plate, she found it gave easily. Without a second thought, without a better thought, Beth pushed too, and she was through.

~*~

The corridor beyond was tiled in plain white, the walls painted green. It was a clear, clean, depressingly serviceable kind of passage, and Beth rushed along it, conscious with each step of how her heels clicked on the floor, how _detectable_ she was, how foolish this might be, if in fact . . .

She rounded a corner and found a stairwell yawning before her. Up . . . down . . . Beth listened. From below came the click of Mrs. Murphy’s heels, signalling that she had chosen to descend. So Beth slipped off her shoes, and did the same.

On reaching the bottom step, Beth crouched in the shadows there, watching the figure of Mrs. Murphy retreat down a corridor with remarkable purpose. Where _was_ she going, Beth wondered, and how did she know how to get there?

Once Mrs. Murphy had disappeared through the door at the end of that corridor, Beth took to her heels and followed. Reaching the door, she set her hand to it very cautiously, pushed it open, and peered inside to find a boiler room in good hissing, working order beyond. No, more than a boiler room—an entire network of pipes and plumbing. The water mains, Beth saw, were set on the far wall, and Mrs. Murphy was walking with absolutely single-minded purpose toward one pipe in particular. She held a small phial of liquid, greeny-yellow that had, Beth was positive, a noxious odor.

It would probably, if boiled, make a terrible yellow-green cloud of steam.

Mrs. Murphy was approaching the pipe, which was supposed to have a valve on top, but the valve, Beth could see now, had been removed and set aside as if in anticipation of Mrs. Murphy’s need. She was lifting the phial closer to—

A blaze of bright blue and gold, edged with crimson, blew past Beth with a rush of fresh air, tackling Mrs. Murphy to the ground.

Beth’s breath blew out of her in a panicked little _whoomph_. Priscilla had believed her, after all.

“Breathing that in would be a terrible way to die, don’t you think?” the Blue Flame asked grimly, pinning Mrs. Murphy to the floor. The phial lay harmlessly on the ground to one side, still intact. Beth felt nearly boneless with the nearness of it all. When the Blue Flame looked up at her, she didn’t know whether to smile or burst into tears.

“I was afraid—” she began, then stopped. What did it matter, now? But something in her voice must have made her fears plain. The Blue Flame smiled softly at her.

“Had to change,” she said, and looked back down to her captive with renewed purpose. “Couldn’t meet the Alchemist in my evening things, now, could I?”

Remarkably, Mrs. Murphy began to wheeze, then gurgle, then laugh.

“I!” she said, amazed. “No, indeed. The _Botanist_ , I am called, but they never asked about me. Assumed it was him, you see, who was doing it all. It suited us, so we didn’t raise a fuss, but they will know soon enough.”

The Blue Flame frowned down at her prisoner.

“The Botanist? But then who is the Alchemist?”

“Ah,” said a voice behind Beth. “That would be me.”

And even faster than the Blue Flame could move from her prone captive to cross the room in time, Edmund Hurley had caught Beth against him and pressed a small glass bauble to the edge of her teeth.

“ _Don’t_ ,” he warned, and his voice was so rich with menace that the Blue Flame, on the verge of rising, remained as she was.

“Good,” said Hurley. The bauble grated against Beth’s teeth. “It’s one of my own inventions. She’ll have a very slow and ugly end, if you press your luck. So let’s not try it. Instead,” he stepped into the room, bringing Beth with him, the bauble still firmly in place, “why don’t you release my sister, and allow her to complete her task? Oh, and,” with an impatient nod to her face, “remove that foolish thing. I knew at once who you were, Priscilla. Roger only had one girl.”

Priscilla stood, and stepped away. She did not remove her mask, however, until Edmund pressed the bauble once more to Beth’s teeth with aggressive menace, and beneath his hand Beth gave a muffled cry.

The Blue Flame at once removed her mask.

“Very good,” he sighed. “Now, I _had_ intended that you should be up there with them when it happened, but we can still achieve the necessary end down here. So long as you breathe deep, and don’t try to fight it.”

“You wanted _me_ ,” said Priscilla. “The whole time, it was me.”

“Yes. We were unsure which gambit would draw you out, so we tried a number of them. You responded rather better than we’d anticipated to them all, but when I learned you had accepted the invitation here it seemed as good a chance as any to bring it all to a close. I have waited years for this. Your father, having the poor sense to take his family on an ocean crossing at wartime, put himself and your mother beyond my reach.” He snugged Beth against him, then, for Priscilla had quivered dangerously, but the sight of him pulling his shield closer stilled her at once.

“But the children, I knew, had survived, and I supposed one day at least one of you would be back. The boys didn’t come, then? Ah, well. I suppose your funeral will be occasion enough to persuade them to cross. I might even welcome them into my home. The devoted former colleague of their father, his protégé, to whom he gave no second thought when he left me high and dry in the midst of our research and took you all away.”

“He had to!” Priscilla cried. “After what you did—”

“He would have come around eventually. He might not have wanted to approve funding for the extended trials at first, but once he saw what I had achieved he would have changed his mind.”

“He _saw_ what you achieved!” Priscilla snapped.

“That was an accident,” Hurley said sternly. “He knew it. You came to the laboratory unannounced, and the experiment residue had not yet cleared. If he had thought I did it deliberately, he would have seen me hanged. But I’d no notion,” he added thoughtfully, “of the effect it would have. These, erm, abilities. I suppose they are the outcome? Truly remarkable. Your father’s half of my research sinking with the ship will undoubtedly be one of the greatest losses to our scientific understanding this century.

“I hold you responsible, of course, but also equally culpable are those who gather above us. They allowed him to do it! He had conducted that research under the auspices of the college, and yet they permitted him to take it away! Only think what my career could have become, if he had not robbed me of what I needed to make a name for myself. Only _think_.”

He squeezed Beth tighter, seeming hardly to know it was she he held. Priscilla’s eyes blazed at him, and Beth knew, without question, that if she had not been held between them, Edmund Hurley would be hanging from the waterpipes by now. Instead he was nodding at his sister, urging her to collect the phial, to take it once more to the pipe, to pour it in. And Mrs. Murphy obeyed. Picked it up again, walked shakily but purposefully to the pipe, raised her hand—

With a thunderous bang, a golden flash of light filled the room. Beth was blinded. The bauble crushed perilously close to her teeth, but then soft hands caught her wrists, and Mr. Hurley’s arms seemed all at once to not exist anymore. He screamed, but she was being pulled free, held close, and Priscilla’s voice was soft and sweet in her ear.

“I’m so sorry, it’s bright, I know, but it was the only way, I couldn’t let him hurt you, Beth, are you all right? _Please,_ Beth, say you’re all right.”

Beth could not, at first. Instead she blinked, and looked around. The golden light dimmed and faded, and as it did she saw two new figures had joined their number. One, a broad-chested man in grey and black silks, held Mr. Hurley in a punishing grip of iron. It was clear to see how he had earned his name. The other, a slighter man in crimson, had a kind of soundwave effect radiating around him still. He saw Beth staring, and gave her an apologetic smile.

“They don’t call me Cacophany for nothing,” he said. Then his gaze slide sideways to Priscilla, and softened still further.

“Damnation, Pris, you should’ve told us sooner.”

“Couldn’t be certain,” said Priscilla, “not until tonight.” Then she set Beth gently to one side, but still kept her arm wound warmly round her shoulders, and said, “Beth, I’m very pleased to present . . . my brothers.”

~*~

“You called me Beth.”

It wasn’t an accusation. More a kind of quiet triumph. Beth, quietly triumphant, stared at Priscilla, who looked back in fond exasperation.

The day after Founders' Dinner they were seated knee-to-knee in a truly lovely drawing room at the Blythe house. Priscilla’s brothers, Henry and Edward, had taken tea and taken their leave. Owens, the butler who hovered with rather more inhuman imperturbability than Beth could fully credit, had also discreetly retired, and so they sat alone.

“It’s your name, is it not?” Priscilla pointed out. “You told me so when first we met.”

Beth was not deterred.

“You always called me Miss Hargreaves. Always. But then, when—” _when you were holding me_ —

“Yes, well.” Priscilla picked up her empty teacup, inspected it, then set it aside. “I had told myself I was not to presume. Until it was over, I didn’t dare.”

“But _why_?”

Priscilla frowned. She pinched the corner of her lip with her teeth. Beth found that the sight of her so uncertain was enchanting. She leaned forward to get a better look, and Priscilla, seeing her do so, threw up her hands.

“Beth! I have _lost_. I have lost so much. All three of us did. First our home, then our parents, and then any semblance of a normal life once the effects of Hurley and Father’s dabbling became apparent in all of us. We were inherited by an intolerably elderly aunt, she had no notion of what to do with us, and so she shut us all up in a country house with Owens and a handful of irregulars to care for us. It was not a _terrible_ childhood, we were happy enough, but it was a constant reminder of how nothing could be counted on to stay.

“And so,” she said, breathing deeply, “when we came home to determine what had happened to us, and what had happened to the man who had done it, and we agreed to divide forces between the three towns with campuses of the college in them, I thought I had my purpose very clearly in mind. Until I saw you.” Her eyes rested on Beth with a kind of softening fondness, as though she were remembering the sight.

“Filed away in purgatory, between poisons and Pythagoras. Just . . . waiting.”

Beth’s face was suffused with prickles and heat. The resulting effect seemed to charm Priscilla.

“It was awful,” she said. “Mercilessly inconvenient timing. I had a thing I meant to do, and the idea of bringing you into any of it seemed unthinkable. Although,” she added wryly, “you did not appear to agree with me on that point.”

“Certainly not,” said Beth firmly. “I meant to help.”

“Of course you did,” Priscilla laughed. “Miss Hargreaves! Uncomplaining in her service of every obscure tome I demanded of her, and too generous in her willingness to sop my pride by pretending to believe a fiction. Which,” she added, “you should not have done. You can ask the boys if you like, my pride wants no sopping. You’d do better to wound it. But without question, Beth, you were the soul of amiable support. My Miss Hargreaves is truly relentless in her service to the public good.”

She leaned forward, drinking in the sight of Beth on the seat across from her, as though she still feared waking from a dream.

“I said ‘still waters’, you know. The day we first met. It’s how I described you. I was right, but . . . Lord! I’d no notion of the depths.”

She put her hand out, fearfully, boldly, and let it hover in the air between them.

“I do, however, look very much forward to learning them all.”

Beth put out her own hand in reply. Priscilla took it, squeezed it, and then in a twinkling she was at Beth’s side, pressed against her, fingers tangled in Beth’s hair and pressing her lips sweetly, softly, to hers.

When they broke apart, breathless, foreheads touching, Beth smiled.

“As I recall,” she said, “you are a prodigiously quick study.”

Then Priscilla kissed her again, and the lesson began in earnest.


End file.
